May 2013 archive

In an email to The Huffington Post on Sunday, GE spokesman Seth Martin wrote that the company paid $3.2 billion in cash income taxes worldwide, including in the U.S., in 2012. In addition, he stated, GE paid more than $1 billion in other state, local and federal taxes.

“GE is one of the largest payers of corporate income taxes,” Martin wrote.

Still, GE and other hugely profitable U.S.-based companies like it have come under fire in recent years over their tax practices. Tax breaks given to corporations cost the U.S. government $180 billion per year, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office. In addition, companies are likely stashing $1.9 trillion overseas in an aim to avoid paying U.S. taxes on those profits, according to a March analysis by Bloomberg.

GE parks the most profits offshore of any company, Bloomberg found. Many companies including, Apple, Microsoft and Google allegedly employ this strategy of keeping money overseas to avoid paying U.S. taxes on those profits.

The real problem is that GE doesn’t pay its fair share of the US tax burden and, apparently, Apple gets away with a billion dollar tax dodge due to a loop hole in the tax laws. Tim Cooke, Apple’s CEO, appearing before Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations defended funneling billions to off shore tax shelters. What didn’t get mentioned at the hearings were the billions that Apple saved using the “excess stock options” tax break. The loophole allows corporations to deduct compensation that they give to executives in the form of stock options as an expense, the same way they deduct cash compensation. The hitch: stock options don’t hurt the companies bottom line, unlike cash options.

“The only meaningful costs associated with this are that the more stock you issue, the more it dilutes the value of the stock that’s already held by shareholders,” Matthew Gardner the executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy told The Huffington Post last month.

Apple took home $3.2 billion between 2010 and 2012 (pdf) thanks to this tax break — the most of any company, the report found. But it’s not the only company taking advantage of the loophole. Activists have criticized Facebook over its use of the executive stock option tax break in recent months after the social networking giant used it to wipe out its entire tax liability in 2012.

Though using the tax break has been rather common practice among technology companies, which tend to issue a higher percentage of their compensation in stock options, it’s becoming more common and lawmakers are slowly starting to take notice, Gardner said.

While the hearing focused on Apple’s offshore holdings, companies have stashed $1.9 trillion in offshore accounts to avoid paying US taxes.

Large U.S. companies boosted their offshore earnings by 15 percent last year to a record $1.9 trillion, avoiding hefty tax bills by keeping the profits abroad, according to a new report.

The overseas earnings stockpile has climbed by 70 percent over the past five years, said research firm Audit Analytics. Data in its report covers the Russell 3000 index of the largest U.S. corporations. [..]

Conglomerate General Electric Co , had the most indefinitely reinvested overseas earnings, at about $108 billion, while drugmaker Pfizer Inc was next with $73 billion, according to Audit Analytics.

Yeah, corporations not paying taxes is the problem.

originally published at VOTS

I guess the fibro flare was inevitable, what with the uptick in stress and all. The tiredness and muscle pain, well, I can deal with that. I’m only mildly annoyed, really. You want to know what’s killing me? The fog. The losing my train of thought, my next word, the standing there with my mouth hanging open…I hate that!

And it is stupid things too. I’ll be standing in kitchen, wanting more coffee, but being fogged, I will have left my cup by my computer. So I say, “Collin, could you bring me my….” that thing, that thing right there, I’m looking at it, I’m pointing at it, the kid is starting to look at me strangely now….”cup, that cup.” Damn it.

My dad talks to my while I’m typing. Well, to be honest, my dad talks to me, no matter what I’m doing. On the phone, typing, talking, reading, and normally, I don’t like to say anything to him because if I do he gives me that exaggerated ‘sorry” that tells me he’s anything but, and I ought to feel like shit for daring to speak. He just thought I’d like to know that pot roast was on sale. While I’m busy telling him that he buys it I just cook it– I look down to notice I just typed “pot roast”– in an e-mail to Dan’s teacher. Yeah…son of a bitch. Backspace, backspace, backspace…..ugh.

Then last night I pissed myself off so badly…I can scarcely express it. I’ve always been a bit of a channel surfer during commercial breaks. I was watching a true crime thing on Discovery ID and it went to commercial, so I surfed. Do you know I never came back? Nope. Just clean forgot I was watching something. It wasn’t like I found something more fascinating to watch on another channel or something like that, no. Oh, no, no, no! I was still mindlessly switching around when a glance at the clock showed me 59 minutes and I made an audible gasp. Now how the hell did that case turn out? Gah!

Stuff like this…it really bothers me.

The main purpose our blogging is to communicate our ideas, opinions, and stories both fact and fiction. The best part about the the blogs is information that we might not find in our local news, even if we read it online. Sharing that information is important, especially if it educates, sparks conversation and new ideas. We have all found places that are our favorites that we read everyday, not everyone’s are the same. The Internet is a vast place. Unlike “Punting the Pundits which focuses on opinion pieces mostly from the mainstream media and the larger news web sites, “Around the Blogosphere” will focus more on the medium to smaller blogs and articles written by some of the anonymous and not so anonymous writers and links to some of the smaller pieces that don’t make it to “Pundits” by Krugman, Baker, etc.

We encourage you to share your finds with us. It is important that we all stay as well informed as we can.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

This is an Open Thread.

Chris in Paris and John Aravosis at Americablog gives us some good news on the aftermath of the deadly tornado in Moore, OK:

• OMG Oklahoma tornado victim interviewed about losing her dog in rubble, when she spots her dog
• Heartwarming videos of parents reuniting with kids at Oklahoma school destroyed by tornado

Then from John, the uglier side of this tragedy from the “Me, But Not For Thee” crowd:

• Oklah. GOP Senator takes own constituents hostage, demands budget cuts or no tornado aid
• Anti-Sandy-relief GOP Oklahoma Senator: Aid for my state is “totally different” than Sandy

Over at Corrente, lambert‘s marathon ObamaCare Clusterf**k continues with:

• The “unbanked” are 27% of those eligible for ObamaCare, and may be denied coverage because they have no way to pay that insurance companies will accept
• Today’s rollout compared to Medicare’s

At FDL’s Newsdesk, DSWright fills us in on the news that we missed while the MSM is reporting the disaster. No, folks, the idiocy in politics and the changing canvas of the “Scandal-Gate” has not stopped:

• White House Changes Story On IRS Knowledge Again
• New Head Of CIA National Clandestine Service Featured In Wikileaks Cables On Torture Case
• Occupy Our Homes Activists Arrested At Justice Department Headquarters

From Jon Walker at FDL Action:

• Poverty Among Senior Citizens is Worse than Official Numbers
• Obama Gives Civil Liberty Abuse a Bipartisan Seal of Approval

Kevin Gosztola continues his reporting on “Reporter- Gate” and the Bradley Manning trial at FDL’s The Dissenter:

• When the Justice Department Pursues Reporters as Spies
• Government Accepts Bradley Manning’s Plea to Lesser Offense Related to Disclosure of Diplomatic Cable

From the many contributors at MyFDL:

• CIA: An Idea That’s Time Has Gone
  
  by David Swanson
• Jamie Dimon’s Sleazy Record
  
  by masaccio
• Changing My Recorded Gender With DOD
  
  by Autumn Sandeen

From the contributors at Grist here are just a few of today’s really interesting features:

• Fourth-grade filmmaker sneaks a camera into the cafeteria to document his gross school lunch
  
  by Susan Laskow
• Bill aims to tackle climate-caused health problems
  
  by John Upton
• Utilities for dummies: How they work and why that needs to change
  
  by David Roberts
• Manhattan to see more killer heat waves
  
  by John Upton

And finally, Charles P. Pierce gives Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse a Big Bravo. Both Charles and Atrios make note of a possible “band reunion” of sorts:

Bring the band back together.

   The president should announce that he has told the Justice Department to appoint an independent investigator with bulldog instincts and bipartisan credibility. The list of candidates could start with Kenneth Starr, who chased down the scandals, real and imagined, of the Clinton presidency.

They learned nothing.

The stupid just burns.

Marching in Chicago: Resisting Rahm Emanuel’s Neoliberal Savagery

By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout

Monday, 20 May 2013 10:16

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s current attempt to close down 54 public schools largely inhabited by poor minorities is one more example of a savage, racist neoliberal system at work that uses the politics of austerity and consolidation to further disenfranchise the unskilled young of the inner city. The hidden curriculum in this instance is not so invisible. Closing schools will result in massive layoffs, weakening the teachers unions. It will free up land that can be gentrified to attract middle-class voters, and it will once again prove that poor minority students, regardless of the hardships, if not danger, they will face as a result of such closings, are viewed as disposable – human waste to be relegated to the zones of terminal exclusion.  Not only are many teachers and parents concerned about displacing thousands of students to schools that do not offer any hope of educational improvement, but they are also concerned about the safety of the displaced children, many of whom “will have to walk through violent neighborhoods and go to school with other students who are considered enemies.”

This is not simply misguided policy, it is a racist script that makes clear that poor black youth are disposable and that their safety is irrelevant.  How else to explain the mayor’s plan to produce a Safe Passage Plan in which firefighters would be asked to patrol the new routes, even though they have made it clear that they are not trained for this type of special duty. That many of these children are poor black children trapped in under-resourced schools appears irrelevant to a mayor who takes his lead from politicians such as Barack Obama and Arnie Duncan, two educators who have simply reproduced the Bush educational reform playbook, i.e., more testing, demonize teachers, weaken unions, advocate for choice and charter schools, and turn public schools over to corporate hedge-fund managers and billionaires such as Bill Gates. Emanuel’s passionate zeal to downsize schools in impoverished black neighborhoods is matched only by his misdirected enthusiasm to lay out $195 million “on a basketball arena for DePaul University, a private Chicago university.”

…

What these three days of demonstrations must address is that without power over the conditions of their labor, teachers become pawns in a neoliberal politics in which they are deskilled, reduced to security guards, and work under conditions that transform education into a form of training.  High-stakes testing and its corresponding tactic of promoting cheating among administrators, putting into play the most degrading forms of competition, and its killing of the civic imagination is both a debased form of instrumental rationality and a reification of method – put another way, a kind of methodological madness.

…

The war being waged against Chicago Public schools, teachers and students is the product of a corporate ideology and pedagogy that numbs the mind and the soul, emphasizing repressive modes of learning that promote winning at all costs, learning how not to question authority, and disdaining the hard work of learning how to be thoughtful, critical, and attentive to the power relations that shape everyday life and the larger world. As learning is privatized, depoliticized, and reduced to teaching students how to be good consumers, any viable notions of the social, public values, citizenship and democracy wither and die.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

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Peter Sheer: Real Outrage Is That Surveillance of AP Reporters’ Calls Was Probably Legal

The real outrage about the Justice Department’s use of secret subpoenas for the phone records of Associated Press journalists is that, based on the information that has surfaced to date, it was probably legal.

Under federal law the Justice Department needs only a subpoena — a piece of paper that a U.S. Attorney generates unilaterally, without any court authorization — to obtain from phone companies and other service providers the call logs for customers. This includes essentially the same information you see on your monthly bill — numbers dialed, calls received, duration and times of calls.

Although federal prosecutors need a court’s OK to obtain the content of phone communications (and most, but not all, email communications), nothing in the relevant federal statute (the Stored Communications Act) requires a prosecutor to satisfy preconditions or to submit to judicial oversight when subpoenaing “metadata” associated with a phone number.

Robert Reich: Global Capital and the Nation State

As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom — eliciting subsidies and tax breaks from countries concerned about their nation’s “competitiveness” — while sheltering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions they can find. Major advanced countries — and their citizens — need a comprehensive tax agreement that won’t allow global corporations to get away with this. [..]

Baloney. The fact is, global corporations have no allegiance to any country; their only objective is to make as much money as possible — and play off one country against another to keep their taxes down and subsidies up, thereby shifting more of the tax burden to ordinary people whose wages are already shrinking because companies are playing workers off against each other.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

Click on image to enlarge

May 21 is the 141st day of the year (142nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 224 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1881, the American Red Cross was established in Washington, D.C. by Clara Barton, who became the first president of the organization.

Clara Barton

Clara Barton (1821-1912) had a career as a teacher and federal bureaucrat when the American Civil War broke out. Barton liked teaching when she was younger. All of her older siblings became teachers. Her youngest sibling was 12 years of age, when Barton was born. Her brother David was always like a teacher to her. She taught her first class, at age 17. She also expanded her concept of soldier aid, traveling to Camp Parole, Maryland, to organize a program for locating men listed as missing in action. Through interviews with Federals returning from Southern prisons, she was often able to determine the status of some of the missing and notify families.

After performing humanitarian work during and after the conflict, on advice of her doctors, in 1869, she went to Europe for a restful vacation. There, she saw and became involved in the work of the International Red Cross during the Franco-Prussian War, and determined to bring the organization home with her to America.

When Barton began the organizing work in the U.S. in 1873, no one thought the country would ever again face an experience like the Civil War. However, Barton was not one to lose hope in the face of the bureaucracy, and she finally succeeded during the administration of President Chester A. Arthur on the basis that the new American Red Cross organization could also be available to respond to other types of crisis.

As Barton expanded the original concept of the Red Cross to include assisting in any great national disaster, this service brought the United States the “Good Samaritan of Nations” label in the International Red Cross. Barton became President of the American branch of the society, known officially as the American National Red Cross. Soon after the initial May 1881 meeting in Washington, on August 22, 1881, the first local chapter of the Red Cross was formed in village of Dansville, New York, where Barton kept a part-time residence between 1876 and 1886. Subsequent local chapters were established in Rochester and Syracuse. Ultimately, John D. Rockefeller, along with four others and the federal government, gave money to create a national headquarters in Washington, D.C., located one block from the White House.

The Authorization to Use Military Force is a joint resolution passed by the United States Congress on September 14, 2001, authorizing the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the attacks on September 11, 2001. During a hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Pentagon officials testified that the authorization would be needed for another 10 to 20 years and could be used anywhere from “Boston to FATA (Pakistan’s federally administered tribal areas).” According to the interpretation of these officials this could be done under the current AUMF without any further authorization from Congress. Those claims elicited disbelief, even from war hawk Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) who said, “For you to come here and say we don’t need to change it or revise or update it, I think is, well, disturbing.”

Indeed, but disturbing is an understatement, but none of the Senators suggested that the powers under the AUMF be dialed back.

Testifying before the committee on May 16 were Assistant Defense Secretary Michael Sheehan; Robert Taylor, the acting general counsel for the Department of Defense; Brig. Gen. Richard Gross, Legal Counsel, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Gen. Michael Nagata, Deputy Director for Special Operations/Counterterrorism, J-37, Joint Staff

This excerpt of the hearing from Democracy Now includes Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC); Robert Taylor, acting general counsel, Department of Defense; Michael Sheehan, assistant secretary of defense for special operations/low-intensity conflict, Department of Defense; and Sen. Angus King (I-Maine).

From Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian on Pres. Obama’s permanent war on terror:

That the Obama administration is now repeatedly declaring that the “war on terror” will last at least another decade (or two) is vastly more significant than all three of this week’s big media controversies (Benghazi, IRS, and AP/DOJ) combined. The military historian Andrew Bacevich has spent years warning that US policy planners have adopted an explicit doctrine of “endless war”. Obama officials, despite repeatedly boasting that they have delivered permanently crippling blows to al-Qaida, are now, as clearly as the English language permits, openly declaring this to be so.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation. This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war – justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism – that is the single greatest cause of that threat. [..]

The genius of America’s endless war machine is that, learning from the unplesantness of the Vietnam war protests, it has rendered the costs of war largely invisible. That is accomplished by heaping all of the fighting burden on a tiny and mostly economically marginalized faction of the population, by using sterile, mechanized instruments to deliver the violence, and by suppressing any real discussion in establishment media circles of America’s innocent victims and the worldwide anti-American rage that generates.

Though rarely visible, the costs are nonetheless gargantuan. Just in financial terms, as Americans are told they must sacrifice Social Security and Medicare benefits and place their children in a crumbling educational system, the Pentagon remains the world’s largest employer and continues to militarily outspend the rest of the world by a significant margin. The mythology of the Reagan presidency is that he induced the collapse of the Soviet Union by luring it into unsustainable military spending and wars: should there come a point when we think about applying that lesson to ourselves?

Then there are the threats to Americans’ security. Having their government spend decades proudly touting itself as “A Nation at War” and bringing horrific violence to the world is certain to prompt more and more people to want to attack Americans, as the US government itself claims took place just recently in Boston (and as clearly took place multiple other times over the last several years). [..]

The Obama administration already claims the power to wage endless and boundless war, in virtually total secrecy, and without a single meaningful check or constraint. No institution with any power disputes this. To the contrary, the only ones which exert real influence – Congress, the courts, the establishment media, the plutocratic class – clearly favor its continuation and only think about how further to enable it. That will continue unless and until Americans begin to realize just what a mammoth price they’re paying for this ongoing splurge of war spending and endless aggression.

Harvard Law professor and former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith, who also testified, wrote this at the end of his brief summery of the hearing:

My general impression of the hearing was that (1) DOD officials were very uncomfortable talking about how they interpret the AUMF and what groups are covered by it, (2) those officials interpret the AUMF very broadly, and (3) several members of the Committee were surprised by the breadth of DOD’s interpretation of the AUMF.  I came away thinking that Congress cannot address the problem of extra-AUMF threats until it gets a handle on how the AUMF is being interpreted and deployed.  I also came away thinking more than ever that Congress needs to re-engage in a serious way about the nature and scope of the conflict against al Qaeda and affiliates.  Amazingly, there is a very large question even in the Armed Services Committee about who the United States is at war against and where, and how those determinations are made.

The solutions are for Congress to repeal the AUMF or for the Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional. Don’t hold your breath for either of those things happening.

The main purpose our blogging is to communicate our ideas, opinions, and stories both fact and fiction. The best part about the the blogs is information that we might not find in our local news, even if we read it online. Sharing that information is important, especially if it educates, sparks conversation and new ideas. We have all found places that are our favorites that we read everyday, not everyone’s are the same. The Internet is a vast place. Unlike “Punting the Pundits which focuses on opinion pieces mostly from the mainstream media and the larger news web sites, “Around the Blogosphere” will focus more on the medium to smaller blogs and articles written by some of the anonymous and not so anonymous writers and links to some of the smaller pieces that don’t make it to “Pundits” by Krugman, Baker, etc.

We encourage you to share your finds with us. It is important that we all stay as well informed as we can.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

This is an Open Thread.

Paul Krugman at his blog Conscious of a Liberal want to know Where Are The Deficit Celebrations?.

This is your Obama DOJ at work protecting us from an 83 year old nun and two pacifists, from transcriber at Corrente:

• In which an 83-year-old nun is convicted of terrorism, her weapon is white roses, and the jury is not allowed to hear a former Attorney General testify in her defense: It’s nukes in America

also from lambert:

• Unlike Michelle Obama, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with aspiring to be a rapper

From Gaius Publius at Americablog:

• Pressure building on OFA over Keystone Pipeline betrayal

At Crooks and Liars, Mike Lux writes about foreclosure protestors demanding that Attorney General Holder hold the Wall Street Banks that ravaged America’s economy accountable:

• The Courage to Put Yourself on the Line

From Suzie Madrak:

• Are The Deficit Hawks Actually Trying To Starve Us Now?

and by David:

• Iowa Senate Republican Staffer Fired After Reporting Sexual Harassment

At FDL Action, Jon Walker on health care:

• Poorly Designed Employer Mandate Could Lead to Problematic Gaming
• Projected Government Health Spending Down Almost a Trillion Since Deficit Hysteria Began

Over at naked capitalism, Dan Kervick:

• Did the House of Representatives Just (Unintentionally) Eliminate the Debt Ceiling?

David Dayen:

• SEC Convenes Foot-Dragging Roundtable on Rating Agency Reform, While Securities Issuers Return to Familiar Rating-Shopping Tricks

From our friends at Voices on the Square:

by Robyn:

• Pentagon acknowledges transgender veterans

and JayeRaye:

• Hellraisers Journal: IWW strikers sing on their way to jail after mass arrest.

And in case you hadn’t turned on the TV or Radio, a huge, deadly tornado swept through Moore, Oklahoma leveling the suburb of Oklahoma City.